Netbooks have been dying a slow death since 2010, and it appears that they are definitely on their way out.

According to IHS iSuppli, total netbook shipments in 2013 will hit just 3.97 million units, a far cry from 32 million units shipped in 2010. Production will cease later this year and shipments in 2014 will amount to just a quarter of a million. By 2015 they will be down to zero.

It’s a rather sad story actually. Netbooks aren’t a bad concept, but the market is transforming and they are being squeezed out by sexier and sleeker tablets. Cheap 11 and 13-inchers powered by ULV Celerons and Brazos chips are also on the market, leaving practically no room for netbooks.

While they may sound like dinosaurs, the fact is that you can still pick up a quite decent nebook for just €199, and in terms of productivity it is a better choice than most tablets. We guess cash strapped students will just have to look somewhere else.

Intel has updated its guidelines for future netbook platforms. We already wrote about the more expensive platform that can get to 12 inch format and 4GB memory at $399 while the less expensive platform, as you would expect, will offer less for less money.

As of Q4 2011, cheaper netbook goes up to $329 price and it can run Atom N2600 clocked at 1.6GHz. The platform of choice is the Cedar Trail-M platform powered with Intel NM10 chipset and on-board integrated graphics. Memory buffer is limited to 2GB DDR3 800MHz and the storage can vary from 32GB SSD up to 250GB HDD.

The OS of choice is Windows 7 starter or Home basic and the choice of MeeGo 1.0 or Chrome OS. The latter two are yet to be released but they should be available by Q4 2011 or should we say end of this year.

Screen size can vary from 7 inch to 10.2 inch and battery is specified from 4 to 6 cell. This is not a bad deal for up to $329, as some systems might end up being cheaper. Let's not forget that some of these future netbooks can end up with WiMAX cards and all of them will at least have WiFi.

With the push for Wireless Display as well as Wireless music, as well as fast wake up from stand by, new netbooks will definitely offer a reason to get your mitts on one, in case you are not completely and utterly in love with tablets only.

Hewlett Packard is set to stir up competition in the netbook market this fall with a hardware lineup that may poke at competitor profit margins. A recent update from sources within channel vendors suggest that the Silicon Valley giant has recently decided to launch new netbooks equipped with Intel’s latest Atom N455 1.66GHz and Atom N475 1.83GHz processors, both of which launched in Q2 2010 and support 64-bit instructions.

Analysts at DigiTimes suggest that HP’s emphasis on the entry-level notebook market will help reinforce Intel’s profit gains with budget-minded consumers in the market for netbooks and ultraportable notebooks that utilize its Atom processors. In the competitive landscape between OEM vendors, HP, Acer, Asustek and Samsung are the four big players expected to place huge emphasis on this market. However, with very little room for hardware differentiation available to manufacturers with the Intel Atom platform, we remain convinced that the major product differences to expect this fall will merely be related to physical form factor, aesthetics, color options and classic brand-name favoritism.

As we mentioned two weeks ago, Acer is preparing to launch its first dual-core Atom netbook, the Aspire One D255, based on Intel’s Atom N550 1.50GHz. This processor utilizes 1MB total L2 cache (2 x 512KB per core) opposed to 512KB on single-core Atoms, supports 64-bit instructions and has an Intel GMA 3150 200MHz integrated graphics core just like the single-core Atom N475 1.83GHz. We suspect HP will launch a similar dual-core Atom netbook in due time, possibly before Q4 begins, but this remains to be confirmed.

In the upcoming third quarter of 2010, Intel expects netbook platforms based on its single-core Atom N455 and N475 processors to feature 512MB to 1GB of DDR3 memory and 20GB to 32GB SSDs or 160GB to 250GB hard drives with 10.2-inch models priced around $249 to $349. In addition, it expects OEM netbooks based on its dual-core Atom N550 to feature 1GB of DDR3 memory with the same storage options with pricing around $349 to $399. It has also suggested that its dual-core netbooks are allowed a screen size variance between 7 inches and 10.2 inches. That being said, we look forward to discovering the screen sizes that HP will incorporate in its upcoming Q3 2010 netbook and ultraportable lineups based on these Atom processors.